My last post of 2016 concerns a topic I’ve written about before, so I’ll make it brief.

While Karl I of Austria effectively became emperor upon the death of his great uncle Franz Joseph, he had to undergo his official coronation as Apostolic King of Hungary in order to open the Hungarian Diet, according to the constitution of that part of the Dual Monarchy. The pageantry was orchestrated by the parliamentary deputy, nobleman, and later novelist Miklós Bánffy (see my earlier post on his trilogy).

Karl was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2004, in part due to his peace overtures to France. He was most tolerant towards Jewish subjects, and in 1918 pardoned Leopold Hilsner, who had been wrongfully convicted in a blood libel case in 1900. Karl died in exile in Madeira in 1922.

French novelist Anatole France wrote of him, “Emperor Karl is the only decent man to come out of the war in a leadership position, yet he was a saint and no one listened to him. He sincerely wanted peace, and therefore was despised by the whole world. It was a wonderful chance that was lost.”

There have been two important dates in Russian history recently: the 25th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the centenary of Rasputin’s assassination.

I was living in Slovakia when the Soviet flag at the Kremlin was lowered for the last time. I’d celebrated Christmas 1991 with a Lutheran family which was gracious enough to host me for the day. (I’d been singing in the church choir with the father of the family. By the way, Russian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated January 7.) I came home to an apartment where I rented a room from an elderly lady, and we watched the news on her black and white. Of course we’d known it was coming, after the failed coup attempt of that August and the declarations of independence by several of the Soviet republics.

Rasputin was an fascinating character, to say the least: a coarse Orthodox faith healer with a penchant for seducing noblewomen, who gained too much influence on the Tsar’s family – at least by most accounts. But I find his principal assassin—Prince Felix Yusupov, who fired the fatal shot—to be a curious example of many things Russian, and I’ve used some facts of his life to illustrate various points in Russian culture courses I’ve taught.

One is his partly Tatar ancestry. Since the Mongol-Tatar invaders “plagued” Russia from the 13th century, and in Russophile interpretations of history were responsible for the country falling behind the West. But medieval Russian nobles often cut deals with the Tatar occupiers, and sometimes married their children off to them. Curiously, although Yusupov was Eastern Orthodox, he was responsible for the construction of a mosque in Crimea. It was apparently fashionable for members of the Orthodox Russian nobility to act as such patrons.

As a young man, it is said he often went out to fashionable restaurants in drag. Apparently this was not a question of sexual identity for him (though there are differing opinions), but rather a disguise since he was one of the richest men in the tsarist empire and would have been much sought after. He married a Princess Irina Alexandrovna a few months before the outbreak of World War I. After the Bolshevik Coup of 1917, they fled abroad, settling in France, where they apparently lived on the proceeds from artwork they were able to get out of the country.

Accounts of the murder vary, and Yusupov’s own version of the story, published in France in the 1920s, is widely considered unreliable in the details. But it’s widely agreed the prince invited Rasputin to his family’s palace, even fetched him from his apartment after midnight on December 29-30, 1916. Rasputin was taken to a cellar room where, supposedly, he was given poisoned wine and cakes. When that didn’t work—perhaps because the servant assigned the task of poisoning the food lost his nerve—Yusupov shot him several times with a revolver. There is no agreement about whether the wounds were fatal, but apparently the victim ran outside and fell in the snow, and was shot in the head by one of the conspirators. They dumped his body in a river.

Enjoy the slideshow as well as this humorous disco song by Boney M, well known in Europe.

I chose this title because the Christkindlmärkte of Central Europe will soon close their stalls as the season comes to an end. But also out of defiance in the face of the recent attack on a Berlin Christmas Market. We will be open year after year after year.

So enjoy this walk back through my years of European travel in December, from Munich to Budapest. Try to imagine the smells of wurst on the grill, and especially the clove scent of mulled red wine. Bells in churchtowers and city halls donging and tinging, the hubbub of locals mingling with tourists. The clouds of stall keepers’ and shoppers’ breath, the handmade wooden souvenirs and ornaments, the smell of fur and pine. That’s the spirit of Christkindlmarkt or “Christ Child Market.”

​A favorite memory of mine was leaving the Vienna market on City Hall Square by S-Bahn. (See the 7th pic in the slideshow.) A mother and father stood him on a seat in the very back of the tram car so he could view the panorama out the rear window. Seeing the decorated trees, he lit into a version of “O, Tannenbaum” in thick local dialect. He was no Vienna choir boy, but he sure left me with an indelible impression of the city’s atmosphere. Way to go!

Late Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593), best known for portraits with fruit, veggies and flowers as ears, eyes, etc., has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years. I stumbled onto his rendering of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus, Roman god of vegetation and the seasons. Seems this Habsburg had a good sense of humor, and I couldn’t resist adding a post about it.

Also, I’m familiar with Rudolf’s reign (1576-1612) thanks to my numerous sojourns in Prague. It was there he held court and, in addition to an obsession with alchemy, employed Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler as astronomers. Brahe is buried there, and Kepler devised his laws of planetary motion in the Bohemian capital. Rudolf is also associated with Jewish lore thanks to his friendship with the famous Rabbi Loew, who in turn figures heavily in the legend of the Golem, an anthropomorphic figure of clay who comes to life.